Bring Back the Boffins

I was at a party recently when someone mentioned that in his transition from a technical role to management, it worried him that the relationship between business units & technical teams was often fractious & showed a lack of understanding. I was quite dismissive at first, suggesting that the old model of client-server approaches to IT activities was getting rather dated; but he assured me that it was commonplace for IT departments to be under-valued & generally less than ideal places to work in as a result.

I've worked predominantly in IT companies, where IT people form a large portion of the staff & are usually treated quite well, but even I had to admit that there are instances where an HR person or marketing/sales, for example, will look down on the engineers who produce the product or service on which the company was built. How strange.

Why?
One of the reasons is pure jealousy. HR people are generally clever enough (IQ) to understand people, as well as personable enough (EQ) to be effective. IT people are too often smarter (IQ) & oblivious to networking & communications skills (EQ) outside of their technical circles. There's an obvious clash. HR people work on the same level as sales people. They don't 'get' technical people, & sometimes are intimidated by both that failure & the realisation that they're not in the right sphere to be an effective communicator - they don't speak the same language. I used to work with a psychologist who referred to technical people as aliens. It actually made her a more effective communicator because of it.

I've been selective in my career, & worked in predominantly tech companies, & even when I haven't done, I've been in consulting where those tech skills are still the service that the company is selling (along with co-workers accounting skills, etc). That's essentially no different - the individuals' talents are the core of the success of the business. In effect, I work in departments of boffins - the people who solve a business' problems.

In many enterprises whose core business is, say, finance, IT is considered a service that supports the core business. These are very large, diverse, companies. Their IT people don't seem to directly contribute to the company's bottom line - they're often seen as a cost centre! Yet, the staff in IT departments are the same kind of people who staff tech companies.

These are definitely the staff that corporate HR will pigeon-hole as uncommunicative, difficult to deal with - perhaps even arrogant. As I said, these are the same technical people, so they're as likely to be at least as smart (IQ) as HR people. In a large corporation, though, the HR people are likely to be (or believe themselves to be) well above average in IQ across the staff.

Conflict.
Worse, not only are the IT people not directly contributing to the company's core business, but the new, exciting bits of product that do get touted as breakthroughs in the way that the business is conducted  come from external consultants - those companies whose core business is their employees' skills. The IT staff are considered second rate - obviously not as clever as the consultants. Generally, this is just not true.

It's taken me quite a long page to describe the problem. At least I do have a solution. In successful tech companies, the engineers who come up with the ideas & implement the product or service are often treated by management as aliens - can't be understood, don't try - but as aliens who you have to respect if you don't want to be hit by a ray gun.

I prefer to think of IT people as scientists - the boffins who solve the company's problems. They are the ones that management turns to when the business has a hiccough. More importantly, large enterprises need to have their boffins in house, rather than simply have an IT service that can be out-sourced with the stroke of a budget pen.

If you don't have your own boffins, then your company's problems won't be solved - the technical issues, the business issues, the future products & services, & the staff happiness level.